Humphrys has a reputation of being a tenacious and forthright
interviewer; occasionally politicians have been very critical of
his style after being subjected to a tough interview on live
radio.[1][3][4]

Contents

Early
life

Humphrys was born in Splott, a poor working class district of central
Cardiff, son of Winifred
Mary (Matthews), a hairdresser, and Edward George Humphrys, a self
employed french
polisher.[3][5] He was
one of five children.[3]
His parents encouraged him to do his homework and he passed the eleven plus
exam.[3]
He became a pupil at Cardiff High School (then a grammar
school), but he did not fit in to the middle class environment
there.[3]
He was an average pupil and left school at the age of 15 years to
become a teenage reporter on the Penarth Times.[1][3]
He later joined the Western Mail.

Career

Humphrys joined TWW, a commercial television channel based
in Wales. He joined the BBC in 1966 as the district reporter for
Liverpool and the Northwest, where he reported the dock strikes of
that time, sometimes for the national news.[3]
He then worked as a foreign correspondent initially having to go
abroad and leave his family for six to nine month periods, at a
time when his children were still young and growing up.[3]
Later he took his family with him to the United States and South Africa where he was sent to start
news bureaux.[3]
He reported the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1973 on television by
satellite from the United States,[3]
the execution of Gary
Gilmore in 1977, and later the same year, when based in South
Africa, he covered the transformation of Rhodesia into
Zimbabwe.

Humphrys became disillusioned with living in hotels and life
on-the-road as a foreign correspondent,[3]
and so he returned to London in 1980 to take up the post of BBC
Diplomatic Correspondent.[1]
In 1981 he became the main presenter of the BBC's flagship Nine
O'Clock News.[1]
This appointment marked a change in the BBC's approach to news
broadcasting. With the appointment of Humphrys and John Simpson, the presenters
of the news became part of the process of preparing the broadcast,
rather than just reading a prepared script as with previous
presenters. The work involved going to many meetings, working late
and reading from an autocue, so in 1986 he immediately accepted a
job on Today when he was unexpectedly offered it at one
day at about midnight by telephone.[3]
The job had become available because John Timpson was going to retire at the
end of 1986.[3]
He started presenting Today in January 1987 joining Brian Redhead. He
still made occasional appearances fronting BBC TV news bulletins in the
1990s. During the 1991 Gulf War he was a volunteer presenter on the
BBC Radio 4 News
FM service.[6] From
1993 he presented the weekly On The Record political TV show until
its demise in 2002.

He made the headlines on 28 August 2004 for giving the yearly MacTaggart
lecture in which he made scathing criticism of the 'dumbing down' of
British television. He criticised reality shows such as Big
Brother, as well as the increasing violence in British soap operas. He made
these criticisms after five years of being without a television
set, and in the context of re-acquainting himself with the medium
after the prolonged gap. Ironically, Humphrys is also the presenter
of the revived version of Mastermind, which has also
been accused of 'dumbing down'. After his criticism of reality
television, Humphrys appeared the following year in Art
School, a show which followed a celebrity reality format.

Humphrys attracted further controversy in September 2005 when he
allegedly branded all politicians as liars and made comments about
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and John Prescott in an
after-dinner speech which was subsequently leaked to The Times by Tim
Allan, a former aide to the Prime Minister.[7] On 6
September 2005, Humphrys was censured by the Corporation for his
use of "inappropriate and misguided" language.[4]

John Humphrys has written several books, including Lost for
Words, in which he criticizes what he sees as the widespread
misuse of the English language, plus 'Devil's
Advocate', 'Beyond Words', 'The Great Food Gamble' and 'In God We
Doubt: Confessions Of A Failed Atheist'.

Humphrys is an agnostic, but has a curiosity to test his
agnosticism and challenge established religions to see if they can
restore his childhood belief in God.
In 2006, he presented a BBC Radio 4 programme, titled "Humphrys in
Search of God" where he spoke to leading British authorities on Christianity, Judaism and Islam to try and restore his faith.[8]

Despite his ferocious reputation, Humphrys is prepared to
send himself up: for example, when he appeared[9] on the
light entertainment programme Top Gear
driving a Peel P50 around
BBC White
City.

On 12 November 2009 he became the only person to replace David Dimbleby as
the host of Question Time when David was
recovering from a minor farming injury.

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Criticism

Humphrys has occasionally been criticised for his forthright
interviewing style: for example, in March 1995 after being
interviewed on Today the former Conservative Cabinet Minister,
Jonathan
Aitken, accused him of "poisoning the well of democratic
debate"; although, Aitken was not supported by his fellow Cabinet Ministers, Kenneth Clarke
and Douglas Hurd
when they were interviewed by Humphrys on the Today
programme, the following Monday.[3]

Humphrys has been criticised for receiving shares in the poll
organisation YouGov for which
he wrote a column. Humphrys denied that there was a conflict of
interest between his role as newscaster and that of shareholder of
a company, the reports of which are often cited in the news on the
BBC.

On Friday 9 May 2008 Humphrys interviewed Richard Dawkins
regarding a recent speech by Cormac Murphy
O'Connor. Dawkins alleged that Humphrys had a "double standard"
of not requiring evidence of a clergyman, despite his reputation
for demanding evidence of politicians. Dawkins asked Humphrys to
explain why. Humphrys, arguing that the difference was that such
evidence cannot be asked of
a man of faith, felt that the
interview was being made "about him" by Dawkins's question.

Personal
life

Humphrys married Edna Wilding (born August 1942) in 1964 and
they soon had two children, a son and daughter, Christopher and
Kathrine.[3]
This marriage broke down in the late 1980s.[3]
Wilding died of cancer in September 1997 in Glamorgan, south Wales; Humphrys described
her last days in a hospice in his book Devil's Advocate.
Christopher is now a professional cellist.[3]

In 2005 he founded the Kitchen Table Charities Trust, a charity
that funds projects to help some of the poorest people on the
planet.[12]

Humphrys was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert
Island Discs on 6 January 2008.[3]
His favourite record of the eight he selected for the show was
Elgar’s Cello Concerto; he chose the biggest poetry anthology
possible as his book and a cello
as a luxury on the desert island.[3]